What's Wrong With the Neighbors?
Your next-door neighbor just shot up a school/office/day-care center. Any
comment?
"I thought he was pretty nice ... But then again, I knew that his
beliefs were way out of line. They were good neighbors, but, well, I got blue
eyes, so I guess that helps."
-- Meda VanDyke on her neighbor, neo-Nazi murderer Buford
Furrow
"He used to say, 'They're watching me, through your satellite
dish.' I'd tell him, 'No, no, Rusty, no, they aren't watching you.' I tried to
convince him, but it made no difference ... He was just a regular guy when he
didn't have this problem. Everybody said, 'He's harmless.' "
-- Ken Moore, on his neighbor, U.S. Capitol murderer Russell
Weston
"We figured they would have questioned him and let him go and
eventually we forgot about it."
-- Eric Anderson, neighbor of Atlanta mass murderer Mark Barton, on the
murder of Barton's first wife and mother-in-law several years
earlier
Pretty nice? Harmless? Forgot about it? Why, oh why, do the neighbors feel
this compulsion to brush aside the dark side of the killer next door? If you
just found out that nice man you saw trimming his lawn yesterday just mowed
down some people, your first reaction would not be to relive the sweet memory
of a friendly hello. Yet in that mass-murder ritual known as knocking on doors,
the reporters never seem to get the gory quote. Instead, the next-door
neighbors go on the record with comments that are naïve, foolish, and odd.
It may be the neighbors are simply following the script. Thanks to
television news culture, the neighbors have undoubtedly memorized what
neighbors are supposed to say, (nice guy, kept to himself) and dredge that from
the subconscious once they hear the knock.
Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbors, for example, told reporters: "He was shy, a
little withdrawn. But not real bizarre," and that, "he never bothered anyone."
(Anyone? What about all those people he killed?) According to his neighbors,
Columbine killer Eric Harris was "a nice guy. Shy person, didn't say much" and
"a very nice, polite, clean-cut kid." Furrow's neighbors called him, "a very
pleasant individual." Barton's neighbors saw him as "a typical American family
man," "a nice guy" who "kept to himself."
The most generous explanation is that the neighbors are demonstrating a
warmhearted American optimism. They want to believe the best about the members
of their imagined community. Barton's neighbors knew he was suspected of
savagely murdering his first wife, but they blocked that out. Furrow's
neighbors knew that he was a neo-Nazi, a member of the Aryan Nations, and a
wife-beater, but they still considered him a "nice guy." The neighbors of
Jonesboro's killer Andrew Golden wrote off the threats he made to other kids,
the shots he fired at their houses, and the punches he threw at girls as just
youthful high-spirits: After all, "He was a quick-to-wave, friendly boy."
The neighbors' comments may also represent a kind of cover-your-ass legal
defensiveness. No one wants to be blamed for not reporting a mass murderer. So
even when killers are as peculiar as Furrow, Dahmer, or Ted Kaczynski, the
neighbors make a Herculean effort to present their homicidal acquaintance as
banal. Then they won't seem like idiots for not noticing his villainy.
This reached new and astonishing heights with Dahmer. Vernell and Pamela
Bass lived in next door to Dahmer. As one paper reported, "Both Vernell and
Pamela visited Dahmer's apartment often. He always kept the bedroom [and
closets] locked. He had a video camera attached to the ceiling, which recorded
every move. Otherwise there was nothing strange, they said." There wasn't? They
also noticed the stench of rotting meat from his apartment and they "heard
sounds of sawing from his apartment day and night." Downstairs neighbor Aaron
Whiteheard said, "One night, I heard what sounded like a kid ... He was crying
like his mother had just walloped him. I heard a big falling sound ... like he
was being hurt." Yet even after admitting all this, Dahmer's neighbors insisted
there was nothing odd about him, that he joined in neighborhood barbecues, that
he was "like the average Joe."
The Unabomber's neighbors said Kaczynski was hardly odd enough to worry
them: "We've got other ones around here that act a lot farther out than he ever
was."
But don't blame the neighbors too much. Their trite comments say a lot more
about the state of modern American neighborliness than they do about the
neighbors themselves. Reporters rely on neighbors to flesh out the characters
of killers, but what, really, do neighbors know? Ask yourself: What could you
say about your closest neighbor?
Some may blame neighborly ignorance on soulless, anomic suburbs, and indeed
Barton, Klebold, and Harris were ciphers to the folks across the lawn. But
Dahmer was a mystery to the folks in his downtown apartment building, and
Kaczynski was an enigma to his neighbors in the country.
No, the ignorance stems more from the very nature of neighborliness.
Neighbors attribute decency to the killer next door because the standard of
behavior required for being a good neighbor is so extremely low. Barton managed
to wave hello from his car. Dahmer went a few times to apartment cookouts.
Furrow once helped someone park a car. Almost anyone, even the most sociopathic
of sociopaths, can get through the occasional interaction like that without
seeming malevolent.
Of course, not everyone fails to understand the killers in their midst.
Those who genuinely knew America's mass murderers have supplied the insight the
neighbors missed. Even as the adults in the neighborhood were remembering
Golden as "a beautiful young kid," the children who played with him were
describing his viciousness and rage. While the neighbors of Harris and Klebold
smiled on them as clean-cut polite kids and assumed they were shattering glass
for "some kind of art project," their schoolmates knew they were into Nazism,
idolized Hitler, and played with guns. They were rightly scared of Klebold and
Harris: "They're really really creepy."
Why did the classmates see what the neighbors didn't? Because you can fake
your way through a neighborly hello, but you can't fake your way through
life.
--This piece was written by Hanna Rosin and David
Plotz.
